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ECS K7VTA3 mainboard Reviews

The K7VTA3 is built around the VIA KT333 chipset that combine support for the faster DDR 333 SDRAM and the AC’97 audio codec. The moth-erboard supports the AMD 462-pin Socket A interface, with a 100 or 133 MHz DDR front-side bus, accommodat-ing the Athlon and Duron range of processors. The motherboard has five PCI expansion slots, RAID sup-port and two USB 2.0 ports, apart from two serial ports, a parallel port and a MIDI/game port. It also has a 4x AGP slot for attaching a graphics card. There is a Communica-tions Network Riser (CNR) slot, which can remotely shift the computer from ‘standby’ to ‘power up’, over a network. The compo-nents on the motherboard are well placed, with small tabs near the CPU socket that pro-tect the board from screwdriv-er slips during heat sink instal-lation. There is enough space between the memory clips and the AGP slot to avoid incon-venience during installation. On the flipside, the ATX power connector could have been placed more towards the edge of the board. Our testbed was powered by an AMD Athlon XP 2400+processor, a Kingston 256 MB DDR333 SDRAM stick, an IBM Deskstar 40 GB hard drive, a MSI GeForce4 Ti4600 graph-ics card, and a 17-inch moni-tor. We ran a number of real world and synthetic tests to get a clear picture of its perform-ance. The Ti4600 add-on card gives the system enough power to handle high-end gaming, yielding a more than adequate score of 222.3 frames per second, while playing Quake III Arena at the highest quality settings and 1024 x 768 resolution, 32-bit colour. The 3DMark 2001 tested the Direct3D capability of the sys-tem, which scored 9643 in the benchmark run at 1024 x 768 resolution, 32-bit colour. How-ever, the CPU Index score of 4365 was lower than other boards. The installation CD, also contains some useful soft-ware such as Acrobat Reader, PC-Cilin, CD Ghost, Genesys, Language Genius and MediaRing Talk. The ECS motherboard along with an AMD Athlon 2400+ provides a good solu-tion for Internet browsing and content creation. Hardcore gamers can install a graphics card to match their needs. Overall, this is a simple moth-erboard, a good choice if look-ing for reasonable quality at a good price.
SPECIFICATIONS:
305 mm x 244 mm, ATX main-board, Socket 462, VIA KT333 chipset, 3x DDR 200/266/333
slots accommodating a maxi-mum of 3 GB memory, 5 PCI slots, 2x IDE connectors, IDE
RAID support, Communications Network Riser slot, 2x USB 2.0 ports, 2x PS/2 ports, 2x serial
ports, one parallel port, one MIDI/game port, jacks for microphone, Line-In and Line-Out.
Box Contents: User’s guide, installation CD, ATA 100 cable floppy drive cable...

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